The changing pattern of Israeli immigration

The immigration of Jews to the “promised land” has always been the cornerstone of Zionism. Now the ultra-orthodox religious parties that are helping keep Benyamin Netanyahu in power are demanding sole control over conversions to Judaism. But two-thirds of the diaspora are not orthodox. And in powerful Jewish community of the United States, the figure rises to 90%. This makes life difficult for Mr Netanyahu. It also raises the question of the changing nature of immigration into Israel, and of its diverse origins and separate communities.

by Amnon Kapeliouk

Founded in Basle a hundred years ago, in August 1897, the Zionist
movement had as its first objective the creation of a national home
for world Jewry in Palestine. Twenty years later, at the end of the
first world war, some 55,000 Jews were living in the Promised Land in
the midst of 700,000 Arabs. By the time of the creation of the State
of Israel in May 1948, they had reached 650,000 and the Arabs 1.3
million. On 1 August 1997 the number of Jews in Israel stood at 4.7
million, 80% of a total population of 5.8 million.

The 2.6 million immigrants who have arrived since 1948 have made
Israel the only country whose population has multiplied by nine in
the space of 50 years. Even so, with only 36% of the world’s 13
million Jews, Israel has still got only the second biggest Jewish
community - lagging behind the United States (with 5.7 million). Not
offering, perhaps, the safe haven that it promised. For the Israelis
have escaped anti-Semitism, only to find themselves living, by a
strange paradox, in the most dangerous country in the world for Jews.
And not for nothing: the occupation of Arab lands and the oppression
of the Palestinians is stopping the establishment of a lasting peace.
Which is why this entity transplanted half a century ago to the very
heart of the Middle East is still not integrated. Yet, if it does not
become assimilated into the region, it runs the risk of eventual
rejection.

Zionism had another important objective: secularism. The movement
founded by Theodor Herzl even showed a certain contempt towards the
rabbbis, who claimed that faith in religion would be the only
salvation against anti-Semitism. However, the great waves of
immigrants from Africa and Asia, almost all practising, demolished
this hope of secularism. The religious parties, decisive in
successive government coalitions, progressively called the tune,
controlling everyone’s lives from birth to death. Even if the influx
of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most of them secular, did
slow down the rise of religious fanaticism.

Another goal of the Zionist founders was that immigrants should
choose productive professions from which they had often been excluded
in the diaspora. This dream became a partial reality during the
British Mandate (1922-48) with the integration of many immigrants
into agriculture, construction and industry. But capitalism soon took
over from this social-national Zionism; and Israel went from being
one of the most egalitarian of countries in the 1950s and 1960s to
one of the least from the 1980s on. At the same time, manual labour
was abandoned as the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza allowed the
Palestinian work force to take over from the Jewish one.

There is a well-known story: a grandfather goes for a walk in the
old part of Tel Aviv with his grandson and says to him, “See this
house, child? It was me who built it. And the road? That was me, too.
And those are the trees I planted.” Shocked, the child asks,
“Grandpa, when you were young, were you an Arab?”

The idealism of the Zionist pioneers has faded, but alia
(in Hebrew, ascending to the promised land), which is its raison
d’être, continues. Of course, Israel is not the only county
to have immigrants. But it is the only one to confer nationality
automatically on a single category of people: Jews. The Law of
Return, adopted in 1953, is founded on the rabbinical definition
whereby “Whosoever is born to a Jewish mother or has converted to
Judaism is a Jew”. The ultra-orthodox claim that this conversion must
take place according to their own definition of religious law
(Halacha), thereby excluding all the conservative, liberal and
reform synagogues to which two-thirds of the faithful across the
diaspora belong - and as many as 90% in the United States.

The Law is racism, say the Palestinians. They are not alone. Can
it be legitimate to grant citizenship to Jews who have never set foot
on the land, and refuse - or even withdraw - nationality to an Arab
who was born there, but has temporarily lived abroad or happened to
be absent at the time of the occupation of the Palestinian
territories in 1967?

Israeli leaders speak of a duty to welcome every Jew who would
wish to live among fellow-Jews or who feels threatened in his home
country. That was indeed the case at the end of the second world war
for several hundreds of thousands who had escaped genocide. In the
first three years of the State of Israel the Jewish population
doubled, with the arrival of 685,000 immigrants. But this first wave
of essentially European immigration was followed by several other
waves, which brought hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab
countries. Iraqis and Yemenis were swept in by the Zionist movement
and sometimes by provocation by Mossad (1), which always collaborated
with the various regimes of the day. The Jews from North Africa came
after independence (variously in 1954, 1956, 1962) and the Six Day
War of 1967.

In the 1970s there were signs of a new wave coming from the Soviet
Union, which grew considerably at the end of the 1980s after Mikhail
Gorbachev’s rapprochement between the USSR and Israel, bringing a
total of over 850,000 Soviets to Israel. From 1985 the Israeli
government also organised the transfer of 60,000 Falashas, the Jews
of Ethiopia. Finally, in the 1990s Israel allowed in - for the first
time in its history - tens of thousands of non-Jewish workers, to
replace Palestinian workers and supply the cheap labour required as a
result of globalisation.

The majority of Jews from Arab countries came to Israel because
they had no other solution. The same is true for those from Eastern
Europe and the former USSR, most of whom wanted to live better and
more freely, only a minority of whom hold Zionist convictions. On the
other hand, for Western Jews (once the war was over), the choice of
the promised land was by its nature ideological or religious. Over
fifty years, only 70,000 American Jews have made alia, while
three times as many Israelis have emigrated to the United States. The
case of South Africa is equally revealing: the end of apartheid
prompted most Jews to emigrate, but only a small minority chose to
come to Israel, with most preferring Europe or Canada, or even
Australia.

In founding Israel, David Ben Gurion dreamed of mixing new
immigrants with the Jewish population established under the British
Mandate. In this social and cultural melting pot, he hoped to forge
the new Israeli, proud, ready to fight, rid of the complexes of
diaspora Jews. They would have the modern values of the (European)
Ashkenazi majority and would talk a single language, Hebrew, in
contrast to the Yiddish spoken by the Jews from Central and Eastern
Europe who disappeared in the concentration camps.

Immigrants with a Judeo-Arab culture coming from the Islamic
countries found themselves in this predominantly Western melting pot.
The Iraqi Jews and their descendants, some 250,000 in all, managed to
preserve part of their heritage. A solid community, well established
in its country of origin, it emigrated to Israel in its entirety,
keeping its own social structure. It was a different story for the
Jewish community from Morocco, half a million strong, but deprived of
its elite who had elected to live in France. As a result, it took a
generation for the Moroccans, as they are called in Israel, to
integrate into the establishment. Consequently, they have complained
of being less well treated than the Ashkenazi.

The reproach is well-founded. According to the officials in charge
of their absorption at the time, most of them lacked the necessary
qualifications, except for the less-skilled trades. Networks of good
schools should have set up in the high-density Moroccan areas and
industries developed, instead of sending these new arrivals into
agriculture, textiles or food, with low salaries and permanent threat
of unemployment. What was needed was a form of positive
discrimination. But there was none. The Moroccans were sent miles
from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, close to the frontier or into
Palestinian towns and villages emptied of their inhabitants. In
short, they formed the lowest echelon in the social pyramid, just
above the Israel’s Palestinian citizens. And their traditional
culture, influenced by that of the Arabs, broke down under the impact
of the prevailing Ashkenazi culture.

If other communities have forgotten their grievances down the
years, the Moroccans have passed theirs down from father to son, as
traumatised as they ever were. Which explains the fierce hatred of
the community towards the Labour Party, whose predecessor, the Mapai,
held the reins of power at the time the Moroccans arrived. And also
the decisive role played by this electorate in the Likud (nationalist
right-wing) victory in the general elections of 1977. Paradoxically,
there is still the same frustration twenty years later, even though
the Moroccans now have a significantly bigger role in government, in
parliament and among the country’s economic elites. “Hitler took your
hearts away, that’s why you can’t understand our distress” shouts an
18 year-old girl to the “Ashkenazi oppressors” in a play put on by
the youth of Ashdod.

But in the meantime, the Moroccan Jews have had the experience of
having the Likud in power. Its policies have not improved the
situation of the most disadvantaged layers of society, of which they
form the biggest part. But the large majority of Moroccan Jews had
voted for Mr Netanyahu at the last election in May 1996 (although the
Iraqis, for instance, preferred Shimon Peres). This shows Likud’s
success, and its cynicism, in manipulating the discomfort of the
Oriental Jews to its own advantage.

To put an end to this, the new Labour leader, General Ehud Barak,
has taken a spectacular initiative: in the name of his party, he has
publicly apologised to the Oriental Jews for their sufferings. The
right denounced this as an electoral ploy. The subjects themselves
appear relieved, but they are waiting to see what Labour would do, if
it returns to power, to improve the lot of the disadvantaged
Orientals.

The story of the 63,000 Ethiopian Jews is far more dramatic.
Shortly after the formation of Israel, the religious authorities had
dismissed their request for immigration. They held that these Blacks
were not proper Jews since their religious practice was devoid of the
vast body of the oral tradition of orthodox rabbinical Judaism. The
green light came in the 1970s from the great Sephardic (Oriental)
rabbi, Ovadia Yossef. But ten years after their arrival, they accused
the society which had taken them in of racism. And it is undeniably
true that the suicide rate in this community is far higher than the
Israeli norm.

Immigration from the former USSR is by far the biggest in numbers,
but it also comes first in terms of education and culture. The
arrival of the ex-Soviets doubled the number of doctors and tripled
that of engineers. In short, apart from its alcoholics and mafiosi,
it is an elite immigration, one which was able to adapt quickly to
fast-changing Western technology (2). As a result, it has made an
exceptional contribution to the growth of the country’s economy: on
average 6% a year since 1989. It took Mr Netanyahu’s election and his
provocative stance to cause that average to drop in 1997 to 2%.

Yet the conditions for integrating this human tide have been and
remain difficult. It is true, each family of four gets a lump sum of
20,000 shekels ($3,300) and has free courses in Hebrew. But many new
immigrants are finding themselves in a precarious financial
situation. Concern number one is housing. Then, the unemployment
figure is higher among the Russian Jews. Specialised people often do
not find work in their own field. An engineer might work as a night
watchman, a doctor as a manual worker, a mathematician as a shop
assistant and so on.

Another source of irritation is the meddling of the religious
authorities, busy sniffing out goyim (non-Jews) among
immigrants who are supposedly all Jewish. And, in fact, 20% to 30% of
the community are not Jewish: there are non-Jewish members of Jewish
families or ex-Soviets who have procured false documents in order to
manage to leave the country. Some of them just consider Israel as a
spring-board for going on to other destinations. Nowadays, more and
more people are leaving to go and live in the West. Apart from the
Russians, according to a recent poll, 19% of Israelis say they would
emigrate if they had the chance (3).

If the “Russian vote” contributed to Labour’s victory in 1992, in
1996 65% of the community’s votes went to Mr Netanyahu. Formed on the
eve of the elections, a “Russian party” won seven out the Knesset’s
120 seats. It leader, the famous Soviet dissident, Anatoli Sharansky,
now holds the convictions of a right-winger who is ready to
collaborate with the far right. His tough talking at the September
congress won him an acerbic criticism from the daily Haaretz:
“It is surprising that some-one who fights for human rights, who has
spent years in Soviet prisons, calls for a policy which aims to
perpetuate the oppression of another people (4).”

In the last few years there has been the unprecedented phenomenon
of the wide-scale arrival of non-Jewish workers. Some 300,000 East
Europeans, Asians and Africans fill unqualified, poorly-paid jobs,
until now reserved for the Palestinians. These latter-day slaves are
miserably housed. But what bothers the guardians of the “purity of
the race” is the fact that they are not Jews. Their worry is that
sooner or later they will integrate into the country through marriage
and naturalisation. Their voices will perhaps be heard one day in
Israel’s pluralist concert. In the meantime, it is nationalism and
intolerance that reigns.

When will Israel become the state of all its citizens and
transform itself into a multicultural society in which all its
communities, Jewish and non-Jewish, can live in harmony?

(1) Most Iraqi Jews, whose situation was generally
satisfactory, were slow to respond to the pressing calls of Israeli
Jews to immigrate. At the start of 1951 a bomb exploded in a Baghdad
synagogue causing two deaths and dozens of wounded. Following which,
100,000 Iraqi Jews decided to leave for the promised land. The
attack, never claimed, has sometimes been attributed to Israeli
agents, something that the Israeli government has always formally
denied.
(2) See Dominique Vidal, “Troublante normalisation pour la
société israelienne”, Le Monde diplomatique, May
1996.
(3) Maariv, 1 October 1997.